As the administration contemplates launching an itty-bitty, teeny-weeny cruise-missile strike, a “change the momentum of the ground” blitz, or grabbing the Russian lifeline, it’s worth reading this little window into their analysis. Here’s a key sentence from an NBC News report on the extremist elements amongst the rebels:

“Most of the groups battling against Assad are composed of Islamist fighters, but only a small minority could accurately be characterized as extremist,” a U.S. official told NBC News, speaking on background.

Ah yes, the the mythical moderate Islamist jihadist. Paging Andrew McCarthy. His piece, three days ago, was spot-on:

Even worse, the Obama Left and the GOP’s McCain wing are applying Washington’s lunatic definition of “moderate.” By this thinking, the Islamic ummah is divided into two camps: an al-Qaeda fringe in one, and in the other the teeming millions of “moderate,” tolerant, peace-loving “democracy” activists. In this fantasy, the Muslim Brotherhood — whose name the Beltway strains to avoid uttering in discussions of Syria — is moderate; and never you mind the bloody catastrophe the Brothers have wrought in nearby Egypt over the last few weeks and months.

In truth, the Brotherhood is an implacably Islamic-supremacist organization that is “moderate” only by comparison with al-Qaeda, and, even then, only if we are talking about al-Qaeda’s methodology of full-time savagery — the Brothers are part-timers who, unlike al-Qaeda, think violent jihad is just one item on the sharia-installation menu. As far as ideology goes — i.e., the imperative that sharia be installed — the two are on exactly the same page. If anything, the Brotherhood’s influence over the “oppositionists” is even greater than al-Qaeda’s. The Brothers are the antithesis of moderate. They are anti-American (though they’ll happily take our help before using it against us), anti-democratic (though they’ll happily hold popular elections in Muslim-majority countries), and rabidly anti-Semitic.

Exactly right. And now the administration is admitting it is counting “Islamist fighters” amongst the allegedly friendly majority of so-called moderate rebels. This fact should be broadcast far and wide. A “moderate” majority fighting force exists only in the administration’s fondest ideological dreams.